The Hidden Trap of Spiritual Bypassing
Many of us are drawn to spirituality in search of connection, meaning, and healing. Whether through meditation, contemplative practice, ritual, or study, the spiritual path often offers tools for cultivating awareness, insight, and inner peace. Yet within even the most sincere and devoted spiritual engagement, there is a subtle trap that can actually hinder genuine growth. Psychologist John Welwood named this dynamic spiritual bypassing: the use of spiritual ideas or practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or painful life experiences.
Spiritual bypassing is not always easy to identify, especially because it often masks as wisdom. We might tell ourselves that anger is unspiritual, that grief is just ego-clinging, or that forgiveness should be immediate and unconditional. We may idealise detachment, mistake dissociation for peace, or interpret avoidance as transcendence. These habits are rarely malicious or even conscious. More often, they’re rooted in a sincere longing to heal, coupled with a fear of the vulnerability required to do so. However, when spiritual frameworks are used to suppress rather than process difficult emotions and experiences, they can create disconnection, inhibit self-awareness, and subtly undermine integrity. Below are several psychological patterns that often accompany spiritual bypassing seen through the lens of psychology and presented not as diagnoses or judgments but as common human tendencies.
Avoidance of Negative Emotions
At the core of spiritual bypassing is often an aversion to difficult emotions such as anger, sadness, fear and shame. Emotional avoidance is well-documented in psychological research as a defence mechanism that can reduce short-term discomfort but often leads to long-term distress. When spiritual narratives are layered on top of this avoidance, such as beliefs that “negative emotions lower your vibration” or that suffering is a sign of spiritual failure, they can reinforce the habit of suppression. The result is not emotional mastery but emotional repression, which can eventually manifest as anxiety, numbness, or chronic disconnection. Over time, this suppression can lead to increased psychological distress, as unprocessed emotions tend to resurface through anxiety, depression, or psychosomatic symptoms.
Overemphasis on Positivity
A pervasive cultural norm, especially in wellness and spiritual communities, is the emphasis on staying positive. While optimism and gratitude can support resilience, enforced positivity, especially when it disallows grief, anger, or discomfort, can be a form of emotional invalidation. In psychological terms, this can resemble toxic positivity: the insistence that one must be cheerful or hopeful at all times, even in the face of pain or injustice. People engaged in spiritual bypassing may avoid meaningful reflection or discomfort by clinging to affirmations or surface-level hope, mistaking this for depth. The overuse of affirmations or optimistic reframing, while sometimes beneficial, becomes problematic when it bypasses the complexity of human emotions and discourages authentic processing. This can erode emotional intelligence and reduce empathy for both self and others.
Attachment to Altered States
Spiritual bypassing can also manifest as a fixation on altered states of consciousness, whether achieved through deep meditation, breathwork or the use of entheogens such as ayahuasca or psilocybin. While these experiences might offer legitimate insight and even therapeutic breakthroughs, they can also become a form of psychological escape when used repeatedly without integration. In such cases, the pursuit of transcendence becomes less about healing and more about avoiding the discomfort of everyday reality. This pattern can resemble addiction, where the emotional intensity or perceived ‘clarity’ of the experience reinforces a compulsive return. From a trauma-informed perspective, seeking altered states repeatedly can serve as a form of dissociative coping, especially for individuals with unresolved psychological or relational wounds. What distinguishes transformative use from bypassing is not the experience itself but the willingness to integrate its lessons into daily life, to engage in grounded emotional work, relational repair, and long-term change rather than seeking more. Without this integration, altered states risk becoming just another method of spiritual escape, disconnected from embodied growth.
Relational Disconnection
When spiritual ideals are used to avoid conflict or interpersonal discomfort, the pattern closely aligns with dismissive-avoidant attachment, in which individuals minimise the importance of close relationships or downplay emotional needs. Using language like “I’m protecting my energy” or “I’m setting my boundaries” may function as a way to avoid vulnerability, accountability, or repair. While boundaries and self-care are important, psychological health also requires the capacity to engage honestly and vulnerably and repair ruptures where possible. This also reflects elements of emotional detachment and conflict avoidance, which are common in people who have learned that relational safety comes from withdrawal rather than engagement. True relational maturity involves navigating conflict, setting boundaries, and staying connected under stress, all of which are undermined by bypassing.
Avoidance of Shadow Work
Perhaps most importantly, spiritual bypassing inhibits shadow integration, or the process of facing the parts of ourselves that are unconscious, uncomfortable, or socially unacceptable. This includes confronting one’s own biases, fears, defences, and patterns of harm. Rather than doing this challenging but essential work, a person caught in bypassing may cling to an idealised spiritual identity such as ‘enlightened,’ ‘healed,’ ‘awake’, etc., that prevents honest self-reflection. The paradox is that real spiritual maturity only deepens when we allow ourselves to see what we’d rather turn away from. Without consciously exploring the shadow, we may cling to a spiritual identity that feels safe but ultimately lacks depth and self-honesty.
Toward an Integrated Path
Recognising spiritual bypassing is not about abandoning spiritual practice but about deepening it, bringing it into contact with the full range of human experience. Psychological and spiritual growth are not separate domains. They support one another when approached with honesty, curiosity, and compassion. A truly integrated path is not one that protects us from discomfort but one that equips us to meet it, feel it, and move through it with presence. In doing so, we don’t transcend our humanity; we embody it more fully.
Nina Vukas
Nina is the founder of Spanda Institute, Program Director and a Lead Teacher for Advanced Study Programs. She has been a Yoga practitioner since 1998, started teaching full time in 2005, and has been educating yogis on their journey towards becoming Yoga Teachers, as well as educating Yoga Teachers to advance their knowledge and teaching skills since 2009. Nina is also a Yoga Therapist, Mindfulness and Meditation teacher, Somatic Psychotherapist and Psychologist.
